Loguetown, the legendary "Town of the Beginning and the End," was a shock to Travis's system. Shells Town had been a sleepy, corrupt backwater. Loguetown was a living, breathing beast of commerce, naval power, and history. The air buzzed with a frenetic energy absent in the East Blue's quieter ports. Here, the grand Plaza of Justice stood where Gol D. Roger had been executed, a site of grim pilgrimage for pirates and a somber monument for the Marines. The base was larger, busier, its white walls gleaming with a more institutional, impersonal authority.
His transfer had been sudden, a direct result of two factors: the official, glowing report Captain Rourke (eager to capitalize on the positive attention and rid himself of a potential future problem) had submitted regarding the "vigilant and effective actions of Recruit Pendragon," and a quiet, administrative nudge from a satisfied Mr. Silas's office, closing the file on the "promising, by-the-book recruit." Travis had been promoted to Seaman Apprentice and reassigned to Loguetown's 3rd Patrol Squadron.
It was a step up, a validation of his plan. But it was also a more dangerous pond. Here, his every move would be under the eyes of more ambitious officers, sharper bureaucrats, and a populace that had seen every kind of Marine from the heroic to the horrific.
His immediate goal, however, was not naval advancement. It was a name from Kuro's latest report: "Mender." A ship's doctor, currently working on a semi-legitimate merchant vessel, the Prosperous Dawn, known to make runs between Loguetown and the Conomi Islands. According to Kuro's spiderweb of informants, she was a woman in her late twenties, an idealist broken by the realities of the world. Her ship treated wounded from skirmishes between Marines and pirates without prejudice, often at its own expense. The crew respected her, but the owner considered her a liability. She embodied Charity, but her kindness had become a weight threatening to drown her.
Travis needed to observe her, to test the metal of this potential second Virtue. He used his first liberty day to find the Prosperous Dawn at its berth. It was a sturdy, wide-beamed caravel, smelling of spices, tar, and, faintly beneath it all, antiseptic.
He saw her on the aft deck, tending to a crewman's badly infected hand. She was tall and lean, with tired eyes the color of sea-worn slate, and dark hair pulled into a practical, severe bun. Her hands, however, moved with a gentle, unerring precision as she cleaned and bandaged the wound. Her expression was one of focused compassion, but the set of her shoulders spoke of a profound exhaustion.
"Just keep it clean, Haron," she said, her voice low and melodic, yet edged with steel. "And for heaven's sake, next time you get a splinter from that rotten rail, tell me before it turns green."
The crewman, a grizzled old salt, grinned sheepishly. "Aye, Doc. You're a saint."
"Saints don't charge for bandages," she replied wryly, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. "They just go bankrupt."
Travis watched from the shadow of a cargo crane. This was the woman. The living contradiction: a healer on a merchant ship, her charity a financial drain, her compassion a source of her own depletion. She was perfect, and she was on the brink of breaking.
He needed to create a scenario. A test of her character under true pressure, not just the daily grind of infection and debt. An opportunity to see if her charity could be forged into something resilient, rather than something that consumed her.
The chance came sooner than expected. Three days into his new posting, his patrol cutter, the Swift, was dispatched to intercept a reported skirmish between two pirate crews near a minor shipping lane. His new superior, a by-the-book Ensign named Voss, saw it as a chance to bag some easy bounties.
When they arrived, the scene was worse than reported. It wasn't a skirmish; it was a massacre. A smaller, faster pirate sloop had ambushed a larger, slower merchant vessel—the Prosperous Dawn. The merchant ship's deck was a charnel house. Smoke poured from its midsection, and the sounds of clashing steel and screams echoed across the water. The attacking pirate sloop, the Sea Serpent, was already grappled to it, its crew swarming over the rails.
Ensign Voss paled. "Hell's bells. That's a full boarding action. Signal the base for backup! We'll hold position and provide covering fire with the deck gun!"
It was a coward's order. By the time backup arrived, the Prosperous Dawn would be looted and sunk, its crew dead or enslaved.
Travis looked at the burning ship. The Mender was on board. This was the crucible.
"Sir," Travis said, his voice cutting through the panic on the Swift's deck. "Backup is twenty minutes out. They'll be finished by then. We have the element of surprise. A boarding action of our own could disrupt them, save lives, and capture the pirates."
Voss stared at him as if he were mad. "Board? They outnumber us three to one! We're a patrol cutter, not a warship!"
"They're distracted, focused on looting," Travis pressed, his Authority of Presence making the words land with undeniable weight. The other crewmen looked from Voss to Travis, doubt and a spark of hope in their eyes. "We hit fast, hit hard, free the merchant crew, and use the ship's defensible points. It's the only chance those people have."
He wasn't asking. He was presenting the only strategically sound option with the calm certainty of a king. Voss, a man whose courage existed only on paperwork, wilted. "You… you think it can work?"
"I know it can. Give me a fireteam. Six volunteers."
To his surprise, hands went up—not just from the Shells Town transfers who knew his reputation, but from Loguetown men stirred by his conviction. He picked five, including a solid, silent gunner's mate named Briggs.
They took the Swift's single longboat, rowing hard and low across the gap. The chaos on the Prosperous Dawn was their cover. They hooked grapnels onto the stern, away from the main fighting, and swarmed up.
The scene on deck was one of pure carnage. Pirate raiders fought the desperate, outmatched merchant crew. The air reeked of blood, smoke, and spilled spice. Travis didn't hesitate. He moved like a force of nature, his issued cutlass in hand. He didn't use his destructive power; this was a test of conventional leadership. His sword work was a blur of efficient, brutal motion—disarming strikes, disabling blows. He wasn't there to slaughter, but to break the pirate assault. He fought his way toward the ship's waist, where the fighting was thickest, his impromptu fireteam forming a wedge behind him.
And then he saw her.
The Mender was not hiding. She was in the thick of it, but not fighting. She had dragged a wounded merchant sailor behind a shattered capstan and was desperately trying to stem the bleeding from a gash in his leg, her medical kit open beside her. A pirate, spotting an easy target, lunged at her with a bloodied axe.
Travis was too far to intercept with his blade. He acted on instinct. He raised his left hand, palm out, and focused. Not a sphere, but a line. A hair-thin filament of grey negation, invisible to all but him, lanced across the deck. It didn't hit the pirate. It hit the axe head, an inch above the haft.
The steel axe head simply vanished, leaving the pirate stumbling forward, staring dumbly at the suddenly weightless wooden handle in his hands. The Mender looked up, her eyes wide, meeting Travis's across the smoky chaos. In that split second, he saw not just fear, but a blazing, defiant anger.
He closed the distance, cutting down the disarmed pirate with a swift stroke. "Get your wounded below!" he ordered her, his voice brooking no argument.
She didn't flinch. "My place is here!"
"Your place is keeping people alive! That's your fight! Now GO!"
Something in his command—the absolute, non-negotiable certainty—got through. She nodded once, grimly, and with surprising strength, hauled the wounded sailor toward a hatch.
Travis and his fireteam fought a retreating action, clearing a perimeter around the main hatch, using the ship's architecture as a choke point. They were holding, barely, when a new threat emerged. The captain of the Sea Serpent, a hulking brute with a cutlass in each hand, roared onto the deck, his elite guards beside him. The momentum shifted.
"Marine interlopers!" the pirate captain bellowed. "Kill them! The ship is ours!"
They were about to be overrun. Travis made a decision. He couldn't unleash wide-scale destruction without risking the Prosperous Dawn and its crew. But he could create a shock.
He stepped forward, ahead of his men, and faced the charging pirate captain. He dropped into a swordsman's stance, but he didn't raise his cutlass to guard. He raised his empty left hand, fingers spread.
"Halt."
He poured his will into the word, into the Authority of Presence, and for the first time, he consciously nudged the sleeping ember of Conqueror's Haki.
It wasn't a wave. It was a pulse. A focused, concussive blast of sheer, kingly will that erupted from him in a silent, invisible ring.
The effect was instantaneous. The charging pirate captain and his guards didn't pass out. They stumbled as if they'd run into a glass wall. Their eyes glazed over with disorientation and primal fear. The lesser pirates behind them froze, their weapons trembling. The merchant crew, already terrified, felt only a wash of awe.
In that frozen second of stunned silence, Travis moved. He was a blur. He disarmed the dazed captain with a twist of his cutlass, slammed the pommel into his temple, and turned his burning gaze on the remaining pirates.
"Drop your weapons. Now."
They did. The fight left them as quickly as it had come, drained by the terrifying, inexplicable force that had just repelled their leaders.
By the time the Loguetown backup frigate arrived, the battle was over. The pirates were captured, the Prosperous Dawn was saved, though heavily damaged. Ensign Voss, arriving with the reinforcements, tried to claim credit, but the merchant crew's testimony was unanimous: a lone Seaman Apprentice named Pendragon had led the counter-board and broken the pirate assault with… with something they couldn't describe.
Travis sought out the Mender in the aftermath. She was in the Prosperous Dawn's smoke-filled sickbay, now an ad-hoc trauma center, her hands and apron stained with blood, moving tirelessly between wounded crewmen from both sides.
He stood in the doorway. She looked up, her exhausted eyes finding his. The anger was gone, replaced by a deep, weary sadness.
"You saved my life," she said, her voice hoarse.
"You were saving others," he replied. "That's why I'm here."
She paused in bandaging a pirate's slashed arm. "Why? Why risk your life for a merchant ship? For people you don't know?"
"Because it was the right thing to do. Because the strong have a duty to protect the weak. Because charity shouldn't be a liability. It should be the foundation."
She stared at him, as if seeing him for the first time. Not just as a Marine, but as a man articulating the principle she lived by, yet had only seen lead to ruin. "A nice sentiment. It doesn't pay for medicine. Or repairs."
"It could," Travis said quietly. "If it was backed by real power. If it was part of a system, not just an individual's burden." He took a step into the room. "My name is Travis Pendragon. I believe in a justice that protects the charitable, that rewards compassion instead of punishing it. I'm building something. I need a healer. Not just a doctor, but the embodiment of Charity itself. Someone who understands that mercy is not weakness, but the highest strength."
He didn't offer her a fruit. Not yet. He offered her a vision. A purpose for her exhaustion.
She looked at the wounded around her—the men she had saved, the enemies she was still treating. She looked at her bloodied hands, the tools of her thankless, bankrupting compassion.
"What are you building?" she whispered.
"A world where a doctor on a merchant ship doesn't have to choose between her principles and survival. A world where the healers are protected, because they are recognized as the pillars of civilization." He met her gaze, letting the absolute sincerity of his resolve show. "It will be a long, hard road. It will require more sacrifice. But the destination… is a place worth your compassion."
Her name, he learned later, was Elara. She didn't say yes. But she didn't say no. She simply nodded, a slow, thoughtful movement, and returned to her work, but her shoulders seemed a fraction less burdened. The spark of a possible future had been lit.
As Travis returned to the Swift, the report of the action already being written by a flustered Ensign Voss, he felt a familiar pull. The Sign-In System. The location: the blood-stained deck of the Prosperous Dawn, a place where violence had been met with principled defense, where charity had persevered amidst slaughter.
[Location Reached: Prosperous Dawn - Deck of Mercy Amidst Carnage.]
[Sign-In Available. Conceptual Significance: High (Charity Under Fire, The Healer's Resolve).]
[Special Condition: User has successfully defended a place of compassion and identified a potential Virtue.]
[Sign-In to claim reward? Y/N]
He selected Y.
This time, the reward was not a power for himself. A warm, gentle light, the color of a healing sunrise, flowed into him and then settled, not in his body, but in a vacant space within his awareness—a space that felt destined to hold something for another.
[Sign-In Successful.]
[Reward: Virtue Resonance - 'Charity's Boon' stored.]
[Effect: This resonating energy can be transferred to a worthy individual who embodies the Virtue of Charity, significantly enhancing their innate healing abilities, resilience, and capacity for compassionate action. Prepares the way for the Virtue Fruit's ultimate bonding.]
He had not gained strength. He had gained a key. A key for the lock that was Elara.
Back in Loguetown, the whispers were already starting. Not about black powder, but about the Seaman Apprentice with the eyes of a commander and the will of a king, who had broken a pirate boarding with a word and a look. The legend of Travis Pendragon was evolving, moving from rumor to something more substantial.
He had found his second Virtue, or at least, her vessel. He had publicly defended the principle of Charity. And he had taken another, firmer step on the path from recruit to legend. The empire of justice was not a dream. It was a patient construction site, and he had just secured its chief physician.